On 03Apr2018 1034, Douglas Berry wrote:
> An ancient grognard approaches, clad in the ragged remains of FASA deck
> plans, sheets of paper filled with arcane scribbling and broken scientific
> calculators. About his neck, a copy of Fire, Fusion, and Steel II is hung
> with a heavy chain.
>
> I am about to speak heresy. Brace yourselves.
>
> You don't need deck plans. Hardly ever. They take up space, are never
> right, and frankly, speaking as someone who has designed countless
> starships since High Guard first came out, people rarely give a damn.
>
> Let me repeat a point. They never come out right, but the ship design
> sequences are far too granular for that kind of fine detail. We can argue
> to the end of time about why computers take up so much space, or what
> percentage of stateroom tonnage goes to common spaces, but in the game, it
> does not really matter.

I agree that this level of details isn't needed on the maps/plans. I
have found a degree of details in descriptions of staterooms helpful in
providing atmosphere. For example, in my current campaign I described
the staterooms in some detail in order to show the players just how
tightly packed in everything was, even by starship design standards
(their new ship being a 'high-performance' 'Solomani' design, two
flavours that both tend to mean 'cramped').

I also did a low detail set of plans, because the ship was a
tail-lander, and some of the players found my text description hard to
follow. How they did I'm not sure, seeing as it was basically "A conical
shape, the decks stacked on top of each other in the following order,
from base to nose..."

I did say I was going to do a more detailed deck-by-deck plan, but the
need for it never came up, so I never did. I have found, like you, that
they are almost never needed. These days I use GURPS *Spaceshsips* for
ship design, and I find that placing the twenty systems that it gives
each ship in a roughly 'ship-shaped' arrangement gives enough detail, as
a rule.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief